Daily Content Archive
(as of Tuesday, March 3, 2015)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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ersatz
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Grammatical PersonGrammatical person refers to the degree of involvement of a participant in an action, event, or circumstance. There are three degrees of grammatical person. What are they? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 The Temple of ArtemisThe Temple of Artemis was a large Greek temple at Ephesus that was said to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The temple, dedicated to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon and twin sister of Apollo, was a 120-year project started by Croesus of Lydia and completed around 550 BCE. The temple was destroyed and rebuilt numerous times. It was first destroyed in 356 BCE in an act of arson committed by Herostratus. What was his motivation? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 George Bizet's Carmen Premieres in Paris (1875)Though it is today one of the most popular operas ever written, Carmen was initially met with such scathing reviews that the opera house had to give away tickets to get people to see it. Shortly after its disastrous premiere, its author, Bizet, died of a heart attack and the director of the struggling opera house resigned. Later that year, however, Carmen opened in Vienna to wide acclaim. Why did critics initially hate Bizet's story of a soldier's doomed love for a wild Gypsy girl? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 George Mortimer Pullman (1831)Pullman was a successful American industrialist and the inventor of the railroad sleeping car. In 1893, he built a company town for his workers in Illinois, and it was showcased in the World's Fair as a grand social experiment. The next year, the town of Pullman was the scene of a violent workers' strike that nearly halted US rail traffic. When Pullman died in 1897, he had to be buried in a massive steel-and-concrete vault to keep activists from disinterring his body. What happened to his town? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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hard on the eyes— Unattractive; ugly. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo (2020)The nation's largest livestock show, with more than 35,000 entries, is held in the famous Astrodome of Houston, Texas. The show is a reminder of the 19th-century days when Houston's shipping trade was based on timber, cotton, and cattle. Things get under way with a downtown parade, and the agenda then includes celebrity entertainers, pig races, and a chili cookoff. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: shotshot - Referring to a fluid dram of liquor, the term is fairly new, dating to 1928 (PG Wodehouse). More... deadline - Originally a Civil War term for a line that marked the distance a prisoner could go before being shot on sight. More... schuss - A straight downhill ski run, it is literally German for "a shot." More... beside the point - The expression is from ancient archery, and literally means one's shot is wide of the target. More... | |